First post, by CMDLineKing
I have been ripping my old dos games down to launch on DOSBox, but I kept running into issues with Redbook CD Audio. I used several different programs to Clone the discs in various formats, but even discs without protections would run into weird errors after mounting. I could copy the contents down and create a generic ISO and the issues went away, but of course I lost CD Audio, due to ISO's being unable to have audio tracks.
I did some digging around after reading about the BIN/CUE format and stumbled across some things that indicated that the CUE sheet itself could be modified, and include external files to make up tracks.. WHAT? Really? So, keep poking and find that you can mount an ISO with a CUE sheet.. So I attempted to rip down my audio to MP3 and use this in the CUE sheet (according to one website this would work), but no dice. So I pulled it all down as a WAV and combined that with my ISO File and IT WORKED. So now, I have Warcraft II Beyond the Dark Portal working with CD Audio, but a self compiled ISO in MODE1/2048. BIN format was MODE1/2352.
I used this same method to create CUE Files for some other games that were having issues with CD Audio and it fixed them all! Before, if I did get the BIN/CUE format to work I would get audio stutters or pops during game play, but with the ISO+WAV+CUE solution I just get smooth game play!
CUE Sheet Contents:
FILE "WARCRAFT2_EXPANSION.ISO" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2048
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "WARCRAFT2_EXPANSION.WAV" WAVE
TRACK 02 AUDIO
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 03 AUDIO
INDEX 01 00:06:02
TRACK 04 AUDIO
INDEX 01 06:36:61
TRACK 05 AUDIO
INDEX 01 13:48:48
TRACK 06 AUDIO
INDEX 01 17:30:54
TRACK 07 AUDIO
INDEX 01 21:07:07
TRACK 08 AUDIO
INDEX 01 22:05:10
TRACK 09 AUDIO
INDEX 01 22:42:71
TRACK 10 AUDIO
INDEX 01 23:40:25
TRACK 11 AUDIO
INDEX 01 29:37:26
TRACK 12 AUDIO
INDEX 01 33:13:72
TRACK 13 AUDIO
INDEX 01 36:49:73
TRACK 14 AUDIO
INDEX 01 40:19:56
TRACK 15 AUDIO
INDEX 01 43:54:19
TRACK 16 AUDIO
INDEX 01 45:21:41
TRACK 17 AUDIO
INDEX 01 46:04:04
TRACK 18 AUDIO
INDEX 01 46:49:48
I used PowerISO to extract the Audio files off the disc. Select all the Audio Tracks on your game disc, then "Extract" as a single WAV file. It will create a WAV and the associated CUE file for the tracks. From there you just need to add the first track section for the ISO of the game.
FILE "GAME_NAME_HERE.ISO" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2048
INDEX 01 00:00:00
Anyway, maybe this is well known, but I kept seeing everyone across multiple sites and forms claim this was impossible without using BIN/CUE. I will continue to experiement and try to get any other versions of this working and report it here.
Ohh and you can actually combine an ISO file with the BIN to create a Frankenstein BIN+ISO+CUE. This did help with the CD Audio playback, but obviously makes file sizes larger, cause the BIN contains the same CD Files as the ISO.
That looks like this:
FILE "EXPANSION.ISO" BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2048
INDEX 01 00:00:00
FILE "WARCRAFT2_X.BIN" BINARY
TRACK 02 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 19:52:05
TRACK 03 AUDIO
INDEX 01 19:58:07
TRACK 04 AUDIO
INDEX 01 26:28:66
TRACK 05 AUDIO
INDEX 01 33:40:53
TRACK 06 AUDIO
INDEX 01 37:22:59
TRACK 07 AUDIO
INDEX 01 40:59:12
TRACK 08 AUDIO
INDEX 01 41:57:15
TRACK 09 AUDIO
INDEX 01 42:35:01
TRACK 10 AUDIO
INDEX 01 43:32:30
TRACK 11 AUDIO
INDEX 01 49:29:31
TRACK 12 AUDIO
INDEX 01 53:06:02
TRACK 13 AUDIO
INDEX 01 56:42:03
TRACK 14 AUDIO
INDEX 01 60:11:61
TRACK 15 AUDIO
INDEX 01 63:46:24
TRACK 16 AUDIO
INDEX 01 65:13:46
TRACK 17 AUDIO
INDEX 01 65:56:09
TRACK 18 AUDIO
INDEX 01 66:41:53